It’s Marketing Month on the COATS blog! This month, we’re looking at the many ways you can grow your business by growing your market share.
When your marketing is dependent on going out to clients, whether by phone, email, direct mail or in-person sales, it’s easy to get a little weary. “Push” marketing can be tough! Plus, printing, postage and mileage costs can really add up. And you might wonder about all the companies out there that you don’t even know about, the companies that are just getting started, who could really use some contingent workers.
What if there’s another way to reach potential clients? Or, rather, a way to make it easy for them to reach you? That’s what inbound marketing is: a way of making your company stand out among its peers and making it especially easy to find and connect with online.
Another term for inbound marketing is content marketing, which describes what you’re putting out into the online universe to attract companies searching for staffing resources. “Content” can be anything from blog posts that you write yourself to pages on your website describing the types of associates you provide to your presence on social media.
As with any other form of marketing, inbound/content marketing requires meaningful messages that you know will resonate with your audience(s): what your company can do for them and the awesome benefits they’ll get from working with you. But because of the nature of the internet, where information is generally expected for free, you have to balance your marketing messages with informative messages that show your expertise in staffing and related issues (hiring, HR, employment law, etc.).
Inbound marketing requires more careful planning than other marketing approaches because it must be ongoing and consistent. Few things are sadder than the blog with 3 posts, the most recent of which is years old. In fact, it’s wise for companies that are just getting started on inbound marketing to get into the pool one toe at a time. Start with sprucing up your existing website for search engine optimization (SEO), to make it easier for potential customers to find you. Then investigate social media, one channel at a time. Finally, when you’re ready to make a long-term commitment, it’s blog time.
There are entire companies, websites, blogs, courses, conferences, etc. devoted to inbound marketing, so if you’d like to learn more, just click on any of the links in this sentence, or google “inbound marketing.” Once you get started on this stuff, it can actually be a lot of fun!
Have you tried inbound marketing? How did it go? What would you recommend to other folks looking into it? Let us know in the comments!
Related posts:
- Marketing: Direct Marketing to Clients
- Are You Ready for Growth? Use Social Media for Marketing
- Marketing: The Basics
- Social Media for Staffing Companies: Avoid the Mullet
- The Candidate Experience: Social Media Outreach
Written by: Catherine Cantieri
Inbound marketing involves getting found by your potential customers through search. It is more successful than traditional outbound marketing methods because you are not interrupting people to get their attention, with emails, calls, commercials, etc. With inbound marketing through internet, you create a useful, informative website and let visitors find and come to you.
Inbound marketing in staffing definitely works, but it DOES NOT replace outbound efforts. Let me share some examples:
At Haley Marketing, we track Google Analytics on more than 250 staffing industry websites. From this we’ve seen that regular blogging (posting once per week or more) will increase website traffic an average of 239% in one year (and in some cases, over 1,000%). However, this traffic is GREAT for recruiting.
However for business development, we find the mix of outbound efforts and content marketing is most effective. We have seen strong content boost cold calling response rates to more than 43%! And we have had clients convert more than 10% of new prospects contacted to active clients in less than one month by integrating great content with their existing sales efforts.
In staffing, content will attract people to your website, but when you combine it with traditional sales and direct marketing, the impact is even better.
David Searns
CEO
Haley Marketing